I really am at a loss for how to describe my week at World Race training camp. It was physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually draining…but was one of the best weeks of my life. And quite honestly, I’m still trying to process all of it. It was like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant. Our days were so busy; full of teaching, activities, and new challenges for our squad to face. We had to survive a night in the woods with a tarp, some rope, and a cooler full of food, we made our way through a simulated marketplace full of street vendors, beggars, and thieves. We nearly drowned as the men in our squad attempted to swim across a lake while holding a log above our heads. We slept on a bus, in tents, in hammocks, and beneath a tarp. Our nights were filled with amazing worship, teaching, prayer, and tears. Tears of joy, heartbreak, pain, tears shed out of love, out of forgiveness, out of praise, tears of brokenness, tears of vulnerability, and tears of freedom. It was one of the hardest weeks of my life, but the Lord blessed me and my squad so much through it.
You can imagine that as a squad, we bonded and became a family very quickly through all that training week put us through. It was amazing to be in such a group of young people who are striving to follow God’s calling on their lives, who would laugh with me, who would dance with me, who would comfort me, who would cry with me. We learned to be vulnerable and real with each other. We learned to start becoming who God made us to be, not the image our parents, friends, church, or teachers put on us. We began to participate in a true community, a team striving for one thing: more of our God.
I do not think I have ever grown so much in my walk with God in one week than in Gainesville, GA at World Race training camp. God wrecked me. He totally changed our relationship. He showed me His love in a whole new deeper and more personal way, and I will forever be changed. He humbled me, and through that He showed me His greatness where I was weak. All my life I have struggled with my self-image. “I’m not good enough” I used to tell myself. “I can’t do anything right”, “I’m a failure”. I let my parents image of myself, my peers image of myself, my own image of myself, give me my identity. Every day I tried to prove myself to others, to myself, and somehow always fell short of perfection… silly huh? But that’s what I did. And when I would fail, which nearly always happened, I would beat myself up over it. But God told me I wasn’t a failure. That through my “failings”, He made me strong. That He could use those “failings” most. And most of all, He told me I was His. I was a child of the King, and that His identity for me was the only identity that was required, needed, or even mattered. He set me free from the lies I had been telling myself for years, and replaced them with a truth that has struck me deeper than any other: I am my Father’s, and my Father is mine, and nothing I could ever do will shatter His image of me.
